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Chapter 3
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Best We Could Do, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Family, Inheritance, and Parenthood
Intergenerational Trauma
Assimilation, Belonging, and Cultural Identity
Repression and Freedom
Memory and Perspective
Summary
Analysis
Returning to the present, Thi Bui notes that her relationship with Bố has improved since her childhood, but she interviews him to try and understand why he “became the way he was.” She illustrates him smoking at the table beside her in four different eras of his life, from his own childhood to his current old age. He tells Thi anecdotes that uncover his multilayered wounds.
The illustrations for this passage show Bố and Thi conversing at four different periods in their lives—with the only similarity being Bố’s cigarette, which he smokes even as a young boy. These panels represent how Bui recognizes that Bố’s strange behavior during Bui’s childhood was somehow shaped by his own childhood—that he somehow never fully processed his childhood experiences, which continue to live inside him.
Themes
Bố’s first story takes place in 1951 in Việt Nam’s northern port city of Hải Phòng, where Bố’s grandfather and great uncle construct an entire street of houses. They dig a hole to get clay for the houses’ foundations, and the hole fills with water and becomes a pond. When he is little, Bố swims and his father catches shrimp in this pond. But then a fabric dyer moved onto the street and began dumping his dyes into the pond, killing everything in it.
Although the story of the pond in Hải Phòng is ultimately disconnected from the rest of Bố’s narrative, it can be seen as a metaphor for his entire childhood in Việt Nam. He builds something briefly sustainable in beautiful in consort with his grandfather, only to watch it destroyed by outside forces and to be forced to move and remake his life in a new place—much like the war destroyed Việt Nam as a whole and forced Bố to move to the US.
Themes
All of Bố’s other stories have “the same ending.” One day, in a village near Hải Phòng, “a dapper gentleman” arrives and manages to find a job and seduce the village chief’s daughter. But his son, whom he brings to the village, becomes an outcast. This son is Bố’s father.
This is the earliest information anyone has about Bố’s family: his origins go no further than his grandfather, the “dapper gentleman,” arriving without explanation in the village. He has no clear idea about who his biological grandmother is, and he recognizes that his grandfather was less than morally upstanding. In other words, Bố never had any sense of his family as a unified, coherent, or loving entity.
Themes
During the Japanese occupation of Việt Nam in the 1940s, Bố’s grandfather (“the dapper gentleman”) convinces both Bố’s mother and Bố’s father to steal opium from his wife, Bố’s grandmother, and run off into the jungle. But they cannot get to the town they want to reach, and Bố falls sick, so they end up in the city. Because of the war, food is scarce—Bố remembers spending countless days hungry, and it is a luxury when his mother manages to buy a small blood sausage to share with him.
Before Bố is even old enough to understand it, his family is defined by strife and internal conflict. It is no wonder that he has little sense of loyalty to them in adulthood. Additionally, the famine adds another layer of trauma and fear to Bố’s childhood. This history makes Bui’s parents’ emotional distance even more tragic: Má and Bố have fought hard to give their children the family they never had, but then cannot connect with the family they successfully build. This illustrates how Bui’s attempt to connect with her parents through their histories is, in fact, part and parcel of her mission to take responsibility for her family.
Themes
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Bố’s father starts an affair with a neighbor and physically abuses Bố’s mother. One day, after beating her, Bố’s father throws Bố’s mother out of the house, and she never returns. Bố has no idea if she survives: there is a famine, with “the dead piled up in doorways” around the city. Eventually, Bố’s father runs off to join the Việt Minh, and Bố’s grandfather brings Bố back to the village in an attempt to manipulate his wife into taking him back. Bố’s grandmother cares for and feeds him, and the whole family—Bố included—disowns Bố’s father when he goes “off to fight for the revolution.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Bố’s father treats his wife with the same cruelty as Bố’s grandfather; indeed, this suggests that abuse and trauma can, in a sense, be inherited from generation to generation. Bố sees his only caregiver left for dead, and then his father abandon him. It is difficult to separate the personal precipitants of these events—domestic abuse and Bố’s grandfather’s greed—from the political and social causes that likely exacerbated them—namely, the famine that sowed desperation throughout Việt Nam.
Themes
World War II comes to a close, and Hồ Chí Minh declares Việt Nam independent. When the Chinese come to “disarm the Japanese” in Việt Nam, Bố’s mother meets a soldier and follows him home to China, where she lived out the rest of her life. Việt Nam nearly builds a peaceful, democratic union—but the French decide to reinvade and, unsure who is and is not Việt Minh, starts slaughtering villagers indiscriminately. Bố’s village is one of their targets, and Bố’s family hides him in an underground shelter where he waits, alone, while the soldiers massacre his neighbors. After four days and a failed rescue attempt by the Việt Minh, the village surrenders, and the French turn it into a base. The Việt Minh retaliate by attacking the chief, Bố’s great-grandfather, and he leads his family—including seven-year-old Bố—away to Hải Phòng.
Bui explains what happened to Bố’s mother only because she needs to close the narrative thread of Bố’s father abandoning her; in fact, for many years, Bố simply assumes that she has died. Her fate reveals both how decisions about family are often made because of circumstance and even desperation. This passage also demonstrates the fragility of “belonging” in Việt Nam: people were constantly moving around, changing their affiliations (even becoming Chinese), and slaughtering people whom they would now consider fellow citizens. So it is unsurprising that Bố feels no great allegiance to his village, which now stands mostly for suffering and traumatic memories. Again, through no fault of his own, he watches his whole world crumble.
Themes
Reflecting on her conversations with Bố, Thi realizes that the man who raised her was, in a sense, the same “terrified boy” from his stories. Her own fear as a child was just an extension of Bố’s. On the next page, Bố looks at Thi’s draft of this chapter and comments that this explains why he isn’t “normal.”
After learning about his earliest years, Bui begins to clearly see why Bố was such an absent and unempathetic parent. Although unconsciously, he was reproducing his own experiences as a child for Thi and Tâm; he simply did not know what a “normal” childhood looked like, or how to create one for his children.
Themes
